Hi I'm Iapetes. I've made a few guest posts here before (like 2?) and occasionally I troll kleps' comments sections here, but usually we talk online (I have an 80 DK on his realm) or AIM. I enjoy a pretty wide selection of WoW's content- arenas, BGs, heroics, post-60 questing, and most relevantly 10 and 25 man raiding both.

Kleps has failed to think things through today, imo. First he wrote this post about the recent 10v25 announcement, and then he asked me if I wanted to write this counterpoint post. What on earth was he thinking?!

To keep it simple, I'll go point by point.

1) If the loss of loot will kill 25s, then they should die.

Kleps posits that arenas were killed in late tBC because raiders lost a big motivation to do them: weapons. Easily accessible gear at a time when raiding was not nearly as accessible. K kleps few problems with this:

A- Arenas are less popular now because blizzard screwed up big time with WotLK- they made everyone way too squishy. Arenas were still very popular in seasons 3 and 4.

B- Arenas still offer the best pvp loot, loot you can't get from battlegrounds. There's still serious incentive to do them if you're a pvper.

C- They aren't dead yet. But it's coming. Kleps' argument is based on the notion that arenas are better for not having as many people. But what about when there's no incentive at all because rated BGs will be easier to organize, easier to play, and offer the same gear to even the worst players? It's tough to enjoy arenas when you can't find anyone who will bother to do them with you.

And that brings me to my next point. How the hell does less people doing 25 mans equate a better experience for anyone who enjoys doing 25 mans? "yay my guild stopped doing 25s entirely and maybe i'm not even invited to any of the 10 mans with decent players"? Players dropping 25s in favor of 10s only ruins a whole lot of 25 man raids.

"Those who enjoy truly enjoy 25 mans will continue to do them" too bad that's contingent on 24 other people feeling the same way.

2) 25 man raiders should not be running 10 man raids just for loot.

Valor Points (the new version of the 'raiding' badge in cata) are going to have a cap on how many you can get in one week. That would have taken care of doing 10m for badges alone. Which is, in fact, how we get most of our gear. Not like ICC 10 gear is much better than ToC25 gear either.

3) 10 man raiding can be its own track, not merely a lesser form.

10 man raiding is it's own track already. It's an easier track but it stands on it's own. Why is that bad exactly? I mean, isn't the appeal of 10 mans in the first place that it's easier to get together and go do something? That it's less 'hardcore'? I'm sure there's a few people out there who wished 10 mans were equal in difficulty to 25s so they could have an extra challenge. But I'm just as sure that most players saying that aren't after bigger challenges, but better gear. For the life of me I can't understand why Blizzard is putting 25 mans at such a huge risk just for some '10m only' raider's E-PEEN.

3) Choices are hard.

Not everyone just pugs 10 man. I'm being forced to choose between 10 and 25 on my paladin, and I'll certainly choose 25 but that means I won't be playing with most of the people in my 10m group anymore. My guild will almost certainly continue 25 mans though, so at least the choice is up to me.

The fact is that players take the path of least resistance to gear. And at the same time there's a limit to what they'll do for it. IE: most guilds are content to do normal mode dungeons and not hard modes. By that same token, in arenas 3v3 and 5v5 have always rewarded more points than 2v2. But the only way Blizzard could get players out of 2s and into 3s this expansion was to restrict weapons and shoulders to the higher brackets. How they can know this, that faster gear wasn't worth a damn to pvpers, and then turn around and give the proverbial Gladiator shoulders and swords to 10 man players... I don't know. I just see a potential disaster and absolutely no good reason to risk it.

EDIT: I forgot one last thing. Kleps' attitude of "well if 25 mans die out that just means they weren't fun" is pretty retarded. But he's not the only person I've seen saying something similar. To those of you who feel this way I'd like to ask you something. Is it more fun to grind heroics for badge gear than it is to run Ulduar 25? If heroics rewarded the same gear as the latest raid and everyone stopped raiding, was that because heroics are more fun?

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comments:

"For the life of me I can't understand why Blizzard is putting 25 mans at such a huge risk just for some '10m only' raider's E-PEEN."

We've heard quite a lot about the supposed e-peens belonging to the complaining 25 man raiders. This is the first time I hear someone mentioning the dedicated 10-man raiders in this aspect. Thanks for balancing things up a bit.

As a 10-man raider, I'm relieved by the equal gear not so much for my own e-peen, but for putting up with other people's.

I dislike being told "oh, this fight is easy" by 25-man raiders who are overgearing the content. I dislike having them wave gear in my guildies' faces (Shadow's Edge/Shadowmourne is the big one) as a show of superiority.

I see this as an equalizer.

I do agree there are a significant portion of players who just go where the loot flows, but as someone who consciously chose 10-man raiding and LOVED raiding ZA in nothing but Kara gear in TBC this is just an affirmation of the playstyle I prefer.

This way a 25-man raider will see the raid as we do and we can't be viewed as inferior for clearing 10-man content slower than them.

Doom and gloom, I say. I remember fears for 25s dying in WotLK. That didn't happen.

I think people need to quit with the whining about this or that side. If you want to do content, find like-minded people and go do it. Motivate yourself. Don't expect Blizzard to constantly bribe people to do what you want. That applies to the 25 man raiders, the 10 man raiders, the hardmode people and the arena and BGs. Like I said in my earlier posthttp://trollshaman.blogspot.com/2010/04/good-kind-of-apathy.htmlWe need to take responsibility for having fun ourselves and stop chasing rewards.

I won't say Blizzard is immune to criticism. Having different servers and a non-trivial fee to move characters makes it harder to bring together like-minded players. I would love to see a month or two of free character transfers so people can go where they need to play as they wish.

Hana, I mean no offense when I say this but... isn't it a bit egotistical of yourself to assume these encounters are easy for those raiders because of their gear? Not many fights in ICC10 are very gear dependent at all, not on normal mode. Gear helps but I don't buy into the oft repeated "WoW is all gear no skill" slogan.

Kleps I remember concerns that pvp would be ruined by the new 'bursty' direction blizzard was trying. And that did happen. Concerns aren't invalid just because they don't always prove to have been valid after the fact.

I see 25 man guilds staying around, however I think there will indeed be a huge shake up. People will need to shuffle around and find new guilds. A sad event I'm sure, but we'll get over it and move on.

Guilds will be able to recruit using raid size and people that like one or the other will gravitate towards the style they prefer. New friends will be made, old friends will be missed. C'est la vie.

I still have yet to find a person to convince me that 25 man raiding is by and large harder than 10 man raiding.

What I have got out of everyone is more on the lines of "it is harder to field 25 people" and "getting 25 people to coordinate their movements is a difficult task."

I'm sorry, but I dont think that an administrative task, such as fielding 25 people, warrants the feel that 25's are "real" raiding, or "hard" raiding. If it carries such significance, I am a 24 hr. a day tech person that juggles the tech needs of my business' entire international system. I'm uber leet, right? I should get paied more than the CEO because I have more of an administration task.

As far as getting 25 people to learn to coordinate, well, it really is no different than 10 man. Sorry to say it, but it isn't. You just take a slower time doing it, because you have more people to teach. In the end, though, if someone dies to the fire, its L2P in 10 man, but justification for better/more loot in 25's? PLEASE. Yall 25's need to take a chill pill.

Having more people allows for more mechanics which would be nearly impossible to implement in a 10 man. For example, mind control. In a 10 man MC would mean a huge DPS loss as 1/5 or 1/6 of your DPS are removed, plus one more to CC them. If they kill someone, as sometimes happens if it's a particularly bursty class (lolret), that's a huge hit to the raid. In a 25 the MC will take out a proportionally smaller piece of the raid.

10s can be as hard as 25s, besides the car herding, but 25s have more flexibility to be hard due to allowing more mechanics.

Wow, the closer we get the more I understand why the next xpac is called Cataclysm. Whatever the FINAL decisions Blizzard makes, I'm pretty sure it's their intent to shake things up.

It'll be an unfortunate consequence, as Copernicus mentions, that guilds will be shaken up and maybe some friendships separated, but Blizz needed a Cataclysm of many kinds to keep things fresh for as many paying customers as possible.

What died when heroics started dropping better and better badges was not Ulduar in specific, but rather the concept of forcing a guild to get together and use a raid night to run themselves through non-progression content in order to try to gear up a new recruit who may or may not end up leaving for a more progressed guild once they're done. This happened before, we saw it many times in TBC and Blizzard more or less deliberately set out to kill it by allowing people to get themselves potentially raid-ready for progression content by themselves.

In my opinion, if people stopped doing raids just because heroics started dropping the same loot, then yes, there was something intrinsically WRONG with raiding if people were doing it ONLY for the loot. I, however, don't think that it would ever happen, because for most people there is the fun to be had playing with your friends and challenging yourself on difficult content.

One of the things that we haven't heard about yet on Cataclysm is how the whole Guild leveling / experience feature is going to work. I wonder if there might be a way to provide a little bit more balance and reward for the difficulties of managing and running a 25 man raid team through a boost that completing 25 man raids versus 10 man raids might provide to guild leveling and experience.

@ Firespirit: One of the biggest points I wanted to get across (and apparently failed to do so) is how even the extra challenge of getting people online is enough to push players away from the content unless they get a big reward out of the extra effort.

And for the record, 25 man raiding IS harder, but currently that does have a lot to do with 25 mans simply being designed to be harder.